MixedAstra MagWhen Olubas writes about Hazzard’s relationship to Australia, the biography comes to life, even though Hazzard spent little of her life in the country. Olubas frames Hazzard as a product of a particular place in time: an insular Australia shaped by the legacies of colonialism and racism ... While Olubas’s biography does an excellent job of narrating Hazzard’s early life in Australia and her nascent career at the U.N. (both in New York, and in Italy), after Hazzard rises to prominence the biography begins to slow. The reader becomes lost in lists and anecdotes ... There’s an endless inventorying of notable people Hazzard encountered at dinner parties, with rarely any substantive detail about what they talked about, nor how those meetings might have contributed and influenced Hazzard’s \'writing life,\' which the biography claims to take as its subject. At times these sections feel gossipy, while at others, it feels as if the author might have been overwhelmed by the amount of archival material ... No criticism can be made of the book in that regard — it is certainly comprehensive. But ideally, a biography forms a self-aware narrative around the life of its subject, a narrative that can draw out the themes and complexities of a life beyond the chronology and happenstance of its days. When the narrative faltered, I admit to having found the book so wearisome that I put it down and couldn’t return to it until reminding myself that the deadline for this review was looming ... There are interesting and illuminating sections, however, particularly those that deal with Hazzard’s relationships with other writers, and how those relationships influenced her own work.
Emily Witt
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksInstead of accepting the existing catalog of sexual and romantic models, Future Sex explores the ways in which these paradigms are both essentialist and insufficient ... When Witt is at her best, she offers readers her personal experience as a lens to examine what it’s like to be alive and desiring. When the book falters, it is largely due to her focus on the white, heterosexual, upper-middle class social spheres of the Bay Area and New York.
